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[The author] traces the evolution of teacher collective bargaining from its pre-collective bargaining roots, through several distinct stages, including the 1997-2001 restructure of the bargaining system as well as the current era in which the provincial government ha staken a more conciliatory, two-tier approach to negotiations. ...[C]oncludes that a consistent them throughout this history is the struggle about the issue of control over education policy and, in particular, teachers' voices in the bargaining workload. --Editors' introduction

[E]xamines the structure and functioning of teacher bargaining under both the Conservative government (1997-2001) and the subseuqent Liberal government, including the latter's innovative and informal introduction of centralizaiton, and the effects of these approahces on fostering or impeding bargaining. --Editors' introduction

[The author] traces the development of teacher bargaining structures in BC through three distinct historical periods. ...[C]oncludes that, by any measure, K-12 teacher collective bargaining has not been a success. --Editors' introduction

[P]rovides an overview and comparative discussion of the basic legal frameworks regulating K-12 teacher bargaining. --Editors' introduction

Employing data from interviews with education sector stakeholders, this study assess the degree to which the more centralized bargaining structure that existed during teacher negotiations in 2005 and 2008 addressed and balanced stakeholders' interests. --Editors' introduction

[M]aps the development of K-12 teacher bargaining, which has been strongly influenced by a series of provincial government social re-enginereering efforts that have shaped the province as a whole. ...[C]oncludes that the system will likely move toward a two-tiered bargaining structure. --Editors' introduction

Explores the conceptual categories of business unionism and social unionism commonly used to classify different approaches to workers' interests, identities and strategies. [The author] points to their much more complex concrete expressions, and argues for a more careful assessment of different forms of workers' political activity, particularly since so many strategic recommendations for the movement's revival emphasize the centrality of social unionism to renewal. --Editor's introduction

Analyzes the housing boom, rising inequality, lowering of employment standards, the attack on organized labour and public sector contracts, and the expansion of temporary and/or precarious workers under the the provincial Liberal government of Gordon Campbell (in office, 2001-2011) in British Columbia. Concludes that unions are in a weakened state and that a broader solidarity movement is needed.

Interpretations of Aboriginal women's work have shifted over time, but they have been absolutely central to First Nations women's experiences of colonialism. Yet, in both women's history and Aboriginal history, there has been a "mystification" of Indigenous women's labor, because it was often defined as nonproductive or marginal within capitalist economies; wage work was particularly neglected (Littlefield and Knack 1999: 4). Yet, by studying women's labor in its multiple forms (paid, unpaid, voluntary, ceremonial, commodity production), and in multiple contexts (bush, urban, reserve or reservation), we can gain immense insight into how colonialism was structured, experienced, negotiated, and resisted by women at the level of daily life. By perusing past academic writing on Aboriginal women and work, this paper explores some of the intellectual, political, and social influences that have shaped understandings of Aboriginal women's labor in Canada and the United States, asking what insights we have gained, what questions we need to answer, and what contradictions we still face in our research. Arguably, we need a dialogue that crosses disciplines and theoretical approaches, with perspectives and traditions from Aboriginal history, feminist theory, and labor studies informing and challenging each other. There are transnational trends and shared perspectives in Aboriginal women's history that cross the 49th parallel; however, we also need to identify how and why national and regional histories and interpretations diverge. Still, one transnational commonality highlighted in this paper is the close connection between politics and research, between the present and the past: the questions posed by scholars have been stimulated and inspired by Aboriginal thought and organizing, and Aboriginal politics have benefited from scholarly research. Although research may still be difficult and contested terrain in Aboriginal–non-Aboriginal relations (Smith 1999; Biolsi and Zimmerman 1997), there is hope that scholarly dialogue might contribute productively to decolonization. --From Introduction

Assesses labour's approach to electoral reform, making the case that shifting union support for voting system reform has reflected broader strategic considerations about how best to secure progressive public policy changes for unions and the working class in particular historical moments. --Editor's introduction

Explores the labour movement's contemporary engagement with strategic voting campaigns. [The author] argues that this approach has been a failure for labour, as both an instrumental tactic designed to block the election of right-wing parties and a practice which ultimately undermines labour's capacity to develop a political alternative to neo-liberalism. --Editor's introduction

Introduces the book's principal themes and comments on the essays contained therein.

In [exploring] the labour movement's engagement with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, [the author] considers the labour movement's pursuit of legal strategies as a method of advancing its strategic interests. ...[The author] argues that labour's judicial-based strategies have produced mixed results for labour, and that ultimately, granting small protections to unions, courts have simultaneously reinforced legal constraints on workers' ability to to organize, associate and challenge the inqualities inherent in the employment relationship. --From editors' introduction

Explores labour's participation in coalition-building on the issue of the environment. ...[The author] argues that social unionism, as a general union commitment, is not enough, gvien the real material conflicts to sort out between different ways of defining and acting on workers' interest. --Editor's introduction

The ubiquity of the immigrant worker in the service sector has come to symbolize the global city, with the taxi industry as a prime example. As participants in a growing number of international conferences, festivals, and business meetings fly into Toronto, they are met and taken to their destination by a taxi driver who himself has journeyed here from some part of the Global South. The trajectories of the taxi drivers greeting visitors in any other “global city,” at least in North America, such as New York or San Francisco or Vancouver, are similar…. From introduction

[The authors] explore the narrow and legalistic form of labour solidarity entrenched and institutionalized in the wake of the Second World War, and argue that the seeds of labour's current political impasse are to be found in that era. --Editor's introduction

[E]xplores the dynamics of labour organizing amongst migrant workers in Canada, focusing on two case studies. First, [the authors] examine recent efforts to unionize migrant farmworkers in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program. ...[The authors] then turn to the case of the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, Québec. ...[Concludes] by assessing the limits and possibilities of [various] strategies, particularly in terms of the implications for labour organizing amongst the growning number of temporary foreign workers in Canada. --From editors' introduction

Analyzes the role played organized labour in advancing women's equity issues in the political arena, with particular focus on the period since the 2006 election of the Conservative [federal] government. --Editor's introduction

This article explores the relationship between precarious employment and precarious migrant legal status. Original research on immigrant workers' employment experiences in Toronto examines the effects of several measures including human capital, network, labor market variables, and a change in legal status variable on job precarity as measured by an eight-indicator Index of Precarious Work (IPW). Precarious legal status has a long-lasting, negative effect on job precarity; both respondents who entered and remained in a precarious migratory status and those who shifted to secure status were more likely to remain in precarious work compared to respondents who entered with and remained in a secure status. This leaves no doubt that migrant-worker insecurity and vulnerability stem not only from having ‘irregular’ status. We introduce the notion of a work–citizenship matrix to capture the ways in which the precariousness of legal status and work intersect in the new economy. People and entire groups transition through intersecting work–citizenship insecurities, where prior locations have the potential to exert long-term effects, transitions continue to occur indefinitely over the life-course, and gains on one front are not always matched on others.

Discusses the growth of precarious work in Canada in the context of labour law, employment law, and union density. Analyzes two organizing initiatives at a community level and at an industry level in which the Service Employees International Union, Local 2 Canada, participated: the Good Jobs for All campaign in Toronto and the Justice for Janitors national campaign. Contents: Development, globalization and decent work: an emerging Southern labour paradigm / Edward Webster -- Beyond the capitalist logic: theoretical debates and social experiences / Melisa Serrano and Edlira Xhafa -- Economy, ecology and the national limits to growth: the global poly-crisis and South Africa responses / Devan Pillay -- Understanding the past to change the present: the social compromise, the corporate theory of society and the future shape of industrial relations / Conor Cradden -- The new economy and labour's decline: questioning their association / Bill Dunn -- Global unions, local labour, and the regulation of international labour standards: mapping ITF labour rights strategies / Mark P. Thomas -- Private equity investment and labour: faceless capital and the challenges to trade unions in Brazil / José Ricardo Barbosa Gonçalves and Maria Alejandra Caporale Madi -- Labour and the locusts: trade unions responses to corporate governance regulation in the European Union / Laura Horn -- Transnational framework agreements: new bargaining tools impacting on corporate governance? / Isabelle Schömann -- Collective actions push trade union reform in China / Lin Yanling and Ju Wenhui -- Creating a functional state: redefining the labour-capital relationship in Nepal / Chandra D. Bhatta -- A rowing boat on the open sea, or in a haven from financial and environmental crises? New Zealand, the global financial crisis and an union response / Bill Rosenberg -- Turkey after 2008: another crisis - the same responses? / Yasemin Özgün and Özgür Müfüoglu -- Addressing competition: strategies for organizing precarious workers: cases from Canada / Maya Bhullar -- Perils and prospects: the US labour movement's response to the economic crisis / Jason Russell -- Meeting the right's attack on public sector unions in the United States: are there effective strategies? / Lee Adler.